Sekaanvand, who was executed on Tuesday in Urumieh prison in Irans West Azerbaijan province, was rarely seen for who she really was: a vulnerable young woman trapped in a cycle of violence and sexual abuse since childhood.

Sekaanvand, who was 24 when she was hanged, had spent almost a third of her life in detention. In February 2012, she was arrested and put on trial over the murder of her husband, a crime that took place when she was 17 years old. She had reported being raped by her brother-in-law and tortured by police after her arrest.

Whats especially chilling about Sekaanvands case is the number of points at which the Iranian authorities could have intervened to help her. Sekaanvand reported the abuse she suffered. She spoke out, yet she was ignored.

Its a scenario that is all too familiar to many women and girls. But because Sekaanvand lived in Iran, her story took an even darker turn.

There are many more like Sekaanvand in Iran, which is one of the worlds last countries to execute juvenile offenders. At least 88 people who were under the age of 18 at the time of the crime are currently on death row, some of whom have been languishing there for over a decade. In particular, Zeinabs case echoes that ofFatemeh Salbehi, who was executed in 2015at the age of 23 for the murder of her husband, whom she had been forced to marry when she was 16.

Looking closer, Sekaanvands case reads like a textbook explainer of the myriad ways the Iranian justice system stacks the odds against women.

Born in northwest Iran into an impoverished and culturally conservative Iranian Kurdish family, Sekaanvand was 15 years old when she ran away from home to marry a man called Hossein Sarmadi. Zeinab had said she saw the marriage as her only opportunity for a better life. But her new husband was violent, and the relationship quickly became physically and verbally abusive.

It was only at her final court hearing, three years after her arrest, that the authorities provided her with a lawyer. At this point, she retracted her confession, telling the judge that her husbands brotherher alleged rapisthad committed the murder.

Sekaanvand said in court that her brother-in-law had told her that, if she accepted responsibility, he would pardon her. Under Iranian law, murder victims relatives have the power to pardon the offender and accept financial compensation instead.

But rather than request further investigations, the authorities dismissed Sekaanvands statementconvicting and sentencing her to death by hanging.

Sekaanvands trauma did not end there. In 2015, while in Urumieh prison, Sekaanvand became pregnant after marrying a male prisoner. Her child was stillborn in September 2015. Doctors said her baby had died in her womb two days earlier due to shockaround the same time that Sekaanvands cellmate and closest friend had been executed. The authoritiesforced Sekaanvand to go back to prisonthe day after the stillbirth and did not provide her with any postnatal care or psycho-social support.

Before she was executed this week, the authorities carried out a pregnancy test on Sekaanvand. When it came back negative, they took it as a green light to execute her.

Sekaanvands life was defined by a legal system which brazenly disadvantages women. A system which sets the age of criminal responsibility at nine years for girls and 15 for boysand the legal age of marriage for girls at 13. It does not criminalize rape of a woman by her husband.

It violently imposes the abusive, discriminatory and degrading practice of forcedhijab(veiling) on women and young girls and then jails the ones who campaign against it.

Its a system where a womans testimony is worth less than a mans. Thats why no one in power listened to Sekaanvands story. They chose to end it instead.

The writer Mansoureh Mills is the Iran researcher at Amnesty International